Reading with... LiYana Silver

LiYana Silver, author of Feminine Genius: The Provocative Path to Waking up and Turning on the Wisdom of Being a Woman (Sounds True, June 1, 2017), is a coach, teacher and speaker who helps women find the full expression of their feminine strengths in work, love and life. Her work has been featured in Forbes, the Huffington Post, Yoga Journal and Jezebel. She lives with her husband and son and as many potted herbs as her windowsills can hold in Asheville, N.C.

On your nightstand now:

I went on a reading fast while completing my recent book, so I am now catching up with Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life by Anne Lamott and Love Warrior by Glennon Doyle Melton. Who knew telling the truth about our crazies and uglies could be so sexy, endearing and empowering? These two books make me feel ever more intrepid to be real and vulnerable in life and in writing, not only because it's way easier than trying to pretend to have it all together, but it also helps to infuse my writing with that heady elixir of truth.

Favorite book when you were a child:

The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis. My favorite in the series was The Magician's Nephew. In my box set, it was numbered as book six out of seven, but really it was meant to be book one. It was my first experience of the power of a prequel--of stumbling upon, completely out of order, the key information to the genesis of the story. (Kind of like life.) I was also chilled and enthralled by the realm of endless, identical, unmarked pools of water, each one leading to a distinct and full world--maybe magical, maybe lethal--that you could only discover by plunging headfirst into the unknown. (Kind of like life.)

Your top five authors:

Maya Angelou, Mirabai Starr, Glennon Doyle Melton and Rumi (especially the translations by Coleman Barks and Mary Oliver).

Book you've faked reading:

The Bible. I wasn't raised reading it, so I took a course in college called "The Bible as Literature," along with my dance major classes and women's studies minor classes. After our first assignment to memorize the long line of who begat whom, I realized I was in for another stint at rote memorization rather than getting acquainted with the life and color of such an important book, so I dropped out of the course. However, I loved learning the translation of Yahweh: "I Am." Not "I Am Great," or "I Am a Mystery," or "I Am Pissed Off," but just "I Am." So that God, by whichever name you call Him or Her, is pure being-ness, the energy that exists before and after we tack on any adjectives or qualifiers.

Book you're an evangelist for:

Caravan of No Despair by Mirabai Starr. Stunning, generous and totally heartrending, this memoir deepened my understanding of the dark night of the soul, and of how profound loss and a sense of spiritual destitution can allow us to reconnect to the Divine, to be opened to the agony and ecstasy of our soul path.

Book you've bought for the cover:

During a really dark time where I was quite unsure what was wrong with me physically and emotionally, I found Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness by Susannah Cahalan on a display table at my local bookstore. I was morbidly excited to hear from someone else who made her way through a stint of "madness," and who had lost herself utterly and then reassembled herself anew. Stunning book.

Book you hid from your parents:

Wifey by Judy Bloom. My parents weren't particularly prudish, as I teetered on the cusp of womanhood, but I still hid from them my curiosity about sex, boys, romance and intimate relationships. I read Wifey under the covers by flashlight, feeling like I was getting into a nightclub with a fake ID, glimpsing through a book-shaped peephole at a compelling world I was just about to step into.

Book that changed your life:

I Never Promised You a Rose Garden by Joanne Greenberg. Since I was a teenager, I have, for whatever reason, been fascinated by the journey into and out of mental illness. I was touched by the healing process of one girl who could have been otherwise lost to the world, and her choice to live sanely in this insane world, even though it would surely not always be a fragrant stroll through a rose garden.

And I must add The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks. It spawned my love of and fascination with neurology. It also thoroughly shifted my perspective so that I could never again see people who had stuff wrong with them as wrong or broken or bad, but as wondrous windows into the mystery of being human. Sacks wrote from love and curiosity, not from a medical ivory tower but rather like Mother Theresa in a white lab coat.

Favorite line from a book:

"Does my sexiness upset you?
Does it come as a surprise
That I dance like I've got diamonds
At the meeting of my thighs?"
--"Still I Rise" by Maya Angelou

Five books you'll never part with:

Vagina by Naomi Wolf. A thoughtful, reverent and thorough examination of this most controversial aspect of womanhood, through the lenses of history, popular culture, pornography, spiritual traditions, medicine and mysticism.

Dream Work by Mary Oliver. My scripture. My touchstone. My altar. My daily bread and my cherry on top.

Veinte Poemas de Amor y una Cancion Desesperada (Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair) by Pablo Neruda. Sometimes my husband reads them to me in the original Spanish, doing to me what springtime does to the cherry trees.

The Places That Scare You by Pema Chödrön, because just when I've figured out how to look one scary part of myself in the eye and fall in love, another part rears up and demands I do it all over again.

The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho, so I can remember that feeling like I've fallen off the path is part of my path.

And a bonus, The Color Purple by Alice Walker, the first book I read that showed me that the body is in fact condensed soul. And that there is no holier place to be than in our skins.

Book you most want to read again for the first time:

The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger. A timeless, tragic, triumphant love story in which childhood selves and future identities comingle in and out of time and space and sometimes--fleetingly, achingly--meeting in the now. (Kind of like life.) It slays me every time I read it.

Book that made you want to become a writer:

I Carry Your Heart with Me and Erotic Poems by e.e. cummings inspired me into a passionate affair with the written word. The visual of each word as it chose to sit on the naked page, the double entendre in a turn of phrase, that a semicolon could be sexy, that an out-of-place question mark could reshape the meaning of a line, and that a set of parentheses could contain a world of secrets (kind of like life). Screw all the rules I was learning in school. Chicago Manual, take a hike. Instead, let the words undress themselves, and reveal what only our hearts and skins can truly speak of.

Powered by: Xtenit